VItal, but not that vital, pt. 2

The Army's Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program has been suspended due to concerns about enlistees' loyalty. That's a shame -- it's been around for 8 years without incident and produced some outstanding soldiers, but conservatives' fears seem to Trump the program's merits. It has since been defunded for FY 2018.

For more details about the program and how it worked, International Student Voice Magazine has a great article (Source), but basically "MAVNI gave the opportunity to certain legal non-citizens who were fully licensed health care professionals or who spoke one of the 44 sought-after languages to join the U.S. Military. In return, they were naturalized as U.S. citizens. This program was developed because the Army had a difficult time recruiting qualified healthcare professionals and recruits who could speak certain languages."

So, let's say, you were a Chinese citizen here in the U.S. on a student visa -- not necessarily a permanent resident -- and you wanted to earn U.S. citizenship. Chinese is (or was) a critical needs language. The MAVNI program would have allowed you to join the U.S. Army, and with honorable service, contribute to the U.S. economy for the rest of your days. [Source]

But one problem the Army couldn't seem figure out was how to properly utilize all the MAVNI enlistees.

Take Saral Shrestha, for example -- the 2012 Soldier of the Year. He qualified for the program because he spoke Nepalese and Urdu, a language common in Afghanistan and used in Pakistan (India, too), and enlisted in 2009. How did the Army make use of his skills?

They made him a mechanic. As he explained, "During my deployment in 2009 I mostly worked as a mechanic, but I did get a chance to translate and help my command." It's nice that he got to translate a little bit, but why recruiters bring him in as a mechanic instead of a linguist? My guess is because that's what his recruiter's office needed to focus on that particular month.

So while the Army felt that he was of vital national interest because of his language skills, recruiters saw him as a way to meet their particular quotas. It's an agency problem.

The MAVNI program's not the only the only example I can think of where the Army drops the ball on utilizing soldiers' language skills. There's also Foreign Language Proficiency Bonus (FLPB). With this program, it doesn't matter if you're in a language coded billet or not, the Army will pay you for simply maintaining proficiency in a "critical needs" language.

I've written about the supposed merits of the FLPB before (Link), but there's another consideration I hadn't thought of before:

Does FLPB help assignment officers put the right people in the right jobs? Unfortunately, the answer this question -- like all the ones in that post -- is a great big No.

Assignment officers have a great many factors to take into account when assigning someone, but a soldier's language skills (apart from filling language coded billets) don't matter a single bit. When I was assigned to Korea, it had nothing to do with the fact I spoke Korean -- it had to do with the fact I was a logistics captain and they had a shortage. The Korean thing was mere icing on the cake.

As another example, consider someone I used to work with: a Haitian-American logistics platoon leader at Fort Hood. At the time, the U.S. was taking part in an earthquake relief effort in Haiti. She would have been an ideal officer to take part in that mission.

But was she ever called up? No. Why not? Because the Army isn't going to try assembling an ad hoc team of folks who've never worked together before for a particular mission -- it prefers to maintain unit integrity. And even if there's a particular need for a translator, the Army will scrub the files of enlisted people already in the unit rather than bring in some outside officer. It just doesn't work that way.

Sadly, the Army's talent management systems seem incapable of tracking and properly assigning language-talented soldiers to utilize their skills. The MAVNI program, like the FLPB, could have been wonderfully useful to the Army and the United States in general. It's a shame we couldn't get our act together to make it work.